Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

by Linus Benedict Torvalds

  IBM did a lot of its Linux work on its own. I think one of the reasons they liked Linux was because they could just do what they wanted to do without having to deal with licensing issues. It’s a company that has had its share of hassles. IBM was screwed over by Microsoft after the two companies jointly developed the OS/2 operating system, which turned out to be just Windows on steroids. Microsoft failed to support OS/2 because it wasn’t interested in sharing the market. Windows NT is what came out of it from the Microsoft side. But OS/2 never paid back to IBM the billions of dollars poured into it. And IBM was plagued with the licensing issues over Java. I think they were just happy not to have all that aggravation with Linux.

  There’s no doubt that IBM was Linux’s biggest coup. And it generated only excitement on the newsgroups—not the sort of paranoia provoked by the Netscape announcement, or any of the seething anticommercialism that has periodically (okay: frequently) divided Linux enthusiasts.

  By July, Informix announced that it would port its databases to Linux, meaning that even if you used Linux to operate your computer, you could run an Informix database. It wasn’t such a big deal at the time. The company had been having financial trouble, but it was still one of the top three database vendors. Linux people were mildly happy about the development, and were writing self-congratulatory essays in Linux advocacy groups.

  Within weeks, from out of nowhere, Oracle followed suit. Oracle dominated databases. Long before the announcement there had been rumors (on the newsgroups) about the company having some internal ports to Linux. And, since Oracle is synonymous with Unix servers, it wasn’t such a major leap to Linux. But if you followed the newsgroups, we had definitely entered the big time. The Oracle announcement had a huge psychological impact, even if its technical impact was zero.

  Like the IBM announcement before it, Oracle’s big move was felt not only by the Linux community but by the folks who are commonly referred to as management decision-makers, although some people prefer the term “suits.” No longer would they be able to say that they couldn’t use Linux because their business depends on databases.

  While the news was gratifying, it didn’t change my life. Tove and I were juggling two adorable kids. Most of my nonfamily hours were spent on Linux maintenance, both at home and in the office. To keep from favoring any one version of Linux, I used Red Hat at work and SuSE, a European version, at home. At one point I felt I wasn’t getting enough exercise, so I decided to ride my bicycle the six miles between our apartment and Transmeta’s headquarters. It was on a Monday. There were no hills to climb, but a strong wind blew in the wrong direction, making it more challenging than I wanted. By the time I left work ten hours later, the wind had shifted so that it was still in the wrong direction. I phoned Tove and she picked me up. Needless to say, biking-to-work didn’t happen again.

  I add this innocuous detail only to illustrate that the Linux developments weren’t affecting my daily life. Most of the activity was taking place at corporations. Technical people, who had long known about Linux were being approached by their companies’ leaders who had been seeing articles about Linux in the trade press, or hearing about it. They would ask their technical folks what the fuss was all about. Then, once they learned the benefits, they would make the decision to have their servers run Linux.

  The situation was playing out in information-technology departments throughout the world, although most of it took place in the United States. It was rarely a decision based on the non-cost of Linux, because the software itself actually represents a small part of such an investment. The service and support are much more costly. What tended to sway the suits were the simple technical arguments: Linux was stronger than the competition, which consisted of Windows NT and the various flavors of Unix. And, importantly, people just hate having to do things the way Microsoft or anybody else says they have to do them. You can do things with Linux that you can’t do with the competition. The original people who used Linux did so because they could get access to sources in ways they couldn’t with commercial software.

  From that perspective, things hadn’t changed much since I had released Version 0.01 from my bedroom. Linux was more flexible than other systems out there. You got to be your own boss. And, at least in the case of Web servers, it didn’t contain the “bloat”—the many unnecessary features—that make up competing operating systems.

  Another thing Linux had in its favor: Despite its growing popularity as an operating system for Web servers, it really didn’t occupy a niche. This is important as a way of understanding Linux’s success.

  Mainframe computers were a niche. Unix in general was a series of niches—the U.S. Department of Defense supercomputer niche, the banking niche. The folks selling operating systems for mainframes and other big systems made money because they were charging a lot for their operating systems. Then Microsoft came along and charged ninety bucks. Microsoft didn’t go after the banking niche or any other niche, but suddenly it was everywhere.

  It was like getting invaded by locusts. It’s hard to get rid of that kind of invasion. (Not that locusts are bad. I like all animals.)

  It’s a lot better to be everywhere and take over every niche, and that’s what Microsoft did. Think of a fluid organism that flows into any place it can find. If one niche is lost, it’s not a big deal. The organism surrounds the world, flowing into anything that’s interested.

  The same thing is happening with Linux today. It flows into anything that’s interested. Linux doesn’t have just one niche. It’s small and flexible and finds its way into many places. You find it in supercomputers, at important places like the U.S. Government’s Fermilabs, or NASA. But that’s kind of an outflowing of the server space. Which is an outflowing of the desktop space—which is where I got started. And at the same time you’ll find Linux in embedded devices, everything from antilock brakes to watches.

  Watch it flow.

  Meanwhile, there’s a great advantage to grass roots. The best and the brightest of the next generation are using your product because you are the thing that makes that generation excited. In an earlier generation, it wasn’t so much Microsoft and DOS but PCs that got people excited. If you were into PCs, you were into DOS. There wasn’t much choice.

  And that was a huge advantage for spreading Microsoft.

  If you look at the brightest young kids around, they’re not all doing Linux, but a lot of them are. Sure, one of the reasons that the open source philosophy and Linux both have major followings in universities is simple: the antiestablishment sentiment. (The same antiestablishment sentiment that made such a huge impact on my dad’s life.) It’s the Big, Evil Microsoft Corporation & Wicked, Greedy, Too-Fucking-Rich Bill Gates vs. the We’re-In-It-for-the-Love-and-Free-Software-for-Everybody & the Self-Effacing (Seeming) Folk Hero Linus B. Torvalds thing. Those kids graduate and take jobs in corporations, where they bring with them their love for Linux.

  So folks who’ve ventured into the depths of Microsoft tell me they’ve seen my face on dartboards. My only comment: How could anybody possibly miss my nose?

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. IBM’s big announcement in the spring of 1998 was followed by similar announcements by every major hardware vendor. By August, Forbes magazine had “discovered” our little world by putting a picture of me on the cover with the words, “Peace, Love, Software.” As company after company made an (inevitable) commitment to Linux, you no longer had to peruse the advocacy newsgroups to read the tea leaves.

  VI

  Linux had captured the planet’s heart like some improbable Olympic gold medalist from an unrecognizable third-world nation.

  I was the poster boy. In a press interview, Eric Raymond explained that part of my appeal (or whatever) was that I was “less visibly odd than a lot of other hackers.” Okay. That’s one hacker’s opinion. Not everybody liked the situation. Richard Stallman campaigned to change the name Linux to gnu/Linux, using the logic that I had relied on the GNU gcc compiler and other free software to
ols and applications to get Linux off the ground. Others were growing increasingly irritated by the fact that Linux was finding a home in the corporate realm.

  The press was playing up the dichotomy between the Idealists and the Pragmatists (not my terms!) among Linux’s now hundreds of thousands of participants. Under that division, those who feared that Linux’s ideals were incompatible with the goals of capitalism were dubbed the idealists. I led the pragmatists. But I saw such analysis as journalistic nonsense—a simplistic attempt to fit everything neatly into a world of black vs. white. (I have the same problem with the way folks view the Linux phenomenon as a Linux vs. Microsoft war, when in fact it’s something else entirely, something far more wide-reaching. It’s a more organic way of spreading technology, knowledge, wealth, and having fun than the world of commerce has ever known.)

  To me, it was a non-issue. Without commercial interests, how else would Linux flow into new markets? How else would it create opportunities for innovations? How else would it be able to reach the people who want an alternative—a free alternative—to the bad technology that’s out there? What more realistic way for open source to take hold than through the sponsorship of corporations? And what better way of getting some of the less interesting work accomplished, boring stuff like maintenance and support, than doing it inside companies?

  Open source is about letting everybody play. Why should business, which fuels so much of society’s technological advancement, be excluded—provided that they play by the rules? Open source can do nothing but improve the technology that companies create, and maybe make them less greedy.

  And even if we wanted to stop the forces of commercialism, what could we do? I was not willing to suggest we hide, go underground, refuse to talk to commercial people.

  Anticommercial sentiments have always been a part of the open source community, but it wasn’t until Linux became a household word among low-tech households that there was a lot at stake. The newsgroups were aflame with the paranoid rantings of some of the vocal crazies. None of the Linux developers I interacted with were worried at all. But others raged on about how Red Hat or some other company would pervert the notions of open source, and about how some people were losing their idealism.

  To some degree, it’s probably true that some open source folks stood to get diverted from their idealism. But while certain people saw that as a losing proposition, I felt that it simply gave us more choice. Technical people who were worried about things like feeding their kids now had an option, for example. You can still be as idealistic as you’ve always been or you can choose to be part of the new commercial breed. You don’t lose anything by having somebody else come in and give you a new option. Before, obviously you couldn’t choose anything but being pure.

  By the way, I’ve never felt that I was in the idealistic camp. Sure I’ve always seen open source as a way of making the world a better place. But more than that, I see it as a way of having fun. That’s not very idealistic.

  And I have always thought that idealistic people are interesting, but kind of boring and sometimes scary.

  In order to hold a very strong opinion, you have to exclude all the other opinions. And that means you have to become unreasonable. This is one of the problems I have with American politics vis-a-vis European politics. In the American version of the game, you draw the enemy lines and the skill rests on one side’s ability to be divisive. European politicians tend to win by demonstrating they can foster cooperation.

  So I’m stuck with the conciliatory approach. The only time I was ever nervous about commercialism was very early on, when Linux didn’t have much of a name. At that point, if commercial people had coopted Linux, there would have been nothing I could do. But that’s obviously not the case now. One concern raised in newsgroup flames amid the activity of 1998 was that commercial people wouldn’t give anything back. To some extent, I had to trust the new corporate players as much as Linux developers were trusting me. And they proved themselves to be trustworthy. They haven’t held back. So far it’s been very positive.

  As poster boy, holder of the Linux trademark, maintainer of the Linux kernel, I felt a growing sense of responsibility. I felt increasingly responsible for the fact that millions of people now relied on Linux, and immense pressure to make sure it worked as reliably as possible. It was important to me to help corporations understand what open source was all about. There was no war, as far as I was concerned, between the greedy corporations and the altruistic hackers.

  No, I wasn’t giving up my ideals by meeting with Intel when they asked me to help them deal with the Pentium FO OF lockup bug (“Pentium FO OF bug?” I hear you ask. Yeah, it’s us whacky engineers, making up whacky names again. “F0 0F” is the hexadecimal representation of the first two bytes of an illegal instruction sequence that made Pentium CPUs lock up. Thus the name). No, it wasn’t hypocritical to promote the wonders of open source code while collecting a salary from a company that was so closed it wouldn’t even tell people what it was doing. The fact is, I respected, and still do, the low-power chip Transmeta was developing, and I saw it as the most interesting technology project out there—and the one with the broadest possible implications. And, for the record, I was part of an effort to get the company to release at least some of its code.

  I felt pressure to hold my ground within the open source community as someone who could be trusted from both a technology standpoint and an ethical standpoint. It was important to me not to take sides among competing Linux companies. No, I wasn’t selling out by accepting stock options that Red Hat was kind enough to offer me as thanks. But it did make sense to turn down the entrepreneur in London who was offering me $10 million just to lend my name to his fledgling Linux company as a board member. He couldn’t fathom that I would turn down such a huge amount for such little heavy lifting. It was like, “What part of ten million dollars don’t you understand?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that I might face such issues. And Linux’s newfound popularity brought with it some tricky times not just for me but for the entire virtual community. In fact, as open source code gained the world’s attention in 1998, one of the big debates dealt with the name itself. Until then we had referred to the phenomenon of sharing software, under such licenses as the GP, as “free software,” and in general referred to the “free software movement.” The term has its roots in the Free Software Foundation, which was founded by Richard Stallman in 1985 to promote free software projects such as GNU, the free Unix he launched. Suddenly, evangelizers like Eric Raymond were finding that journalists were confused. Did the word “free” mean it didn’t cost anything? Did it mean “free” as in no restrictions? Did it mean “free” as in freedom? It turned out that Brian Behlendorf, who was talking to journalists on behalf of Apache, was encountering similar frustrations. After weeks of private email exchanges in which I was not a participant but was merely cc:ed (I wasn’t interested in the political side), a consensus was reached: We would refer to it as “open” instead of “free.” Hence, the free software movement became the open source movement—for people who preferred to see it as a movement, which I guess it was. However, the Free Software Foundation is still called the Free Software Foundation, and Richard Stallman is still the psychological mastermind behind it.

  As one of the de facto leaders of that movement, I was increasingly in demand. Every time my phone rang at Transmeta—and it rang all the time those days—it meant one of two things: Either a journalist wanted to interview me, or the organizers of a conference wanted me to speak. In order to spread the word about open source and Linux, I felt obligated to do both. Take a shy math wiz, put him on the greet-and-grin circuit for a populist cause, and you’ve created a folk hero. Forget what Eric Raymond said about me being less visibly odd than a lot of hackers. A big part of my appeal (or whatever you want to call it) is that I wasn’t Bill Gates.

  Journalists seemed to love the fact that, while Gates lived in a high-tech lakeside mansion, I was tripping over my
daughters’ playthings in our new location—a three-bedroom ranch house of a duplex with bad plumbing in boring Santa Clara. And that I drove a boring Pontiac. And answered my own phone. Who wouldn’t love me?

  As Linux came to be viewed as a real threat to Microsoft—and at the time of Microsoft’s antitrust woes, it sure needed at least the appearance of a real threat—the press jumped on every development as if it were covering World War III. Somebody leaked the “Halloween Document,” an internal Microsoft memo indicating that the company was concerned about Linux. Soon Steve Balmer was quoted as saying, “Sure, I’m worried.” The fact was, even if Microsoft stood to benefit by playing up the competition its Windows NT was getting from Linux, the reality was that the competition would only get more intense.

  I didn’t have to stand on a soap box and say horrible things about Microsoft. What would be the point? Events just play themselves out, and they played themselves out in favor of Linux. Journalists loved it all. The Softspoken (like a fox) David vs. the Monopolistic, Meanspirited Goliath. And, since I’m being completely candid, I actually enjoyed talking about it all to reporters. I like to call journalists scum, but I found most of my interviews to be fun. The reporters typically were interested in our story—who wouldn’t root for the underdog?

  Once they got their fill of the Amoeba-that-Destroyed-Microsoft plot (note: in the interest of full disclosure, this sentence has been spell-checked by a Microsoft product), journalists wanted to understand the concept of open source. That message was taking less and less time to get across, since people could now see examples of it in action. What seemed to amaze them next was the administration of Linux. They couldn’t grasp how the largest collaborative project in the history of humanity could possibly be managed so effectively when the average thirty-person company typically degenerates into something resembling barnyard chaos.